Summary 

I’m kicking off a brand new, fully revamped three-part series on The 10 Phases of Weight Loss and trust me, this is a series you do not want to miss. Whether you’re just getting started or you've been on the weight loss roller coaster for years, you’re going to see yourself in these phases.

In Part 1, I’m breaking down the first three phases most high-achieving women move through on their wellness journey and why these particular phases feel so familiar but also so frustrating. If you've ever gotten really excited about a plan, gone down a research rabbit hole, and then completely stalled the moment real life hit… this episode will make you feel seen, and offer a fresh, compassionate lens to move forward.

Enter the Giveaway: https://www.burnstressloseweight.com/celebrate

Learn more: https://www.burnstressloseweight.com/ 

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• Why the initial burst of motivation can feel like progress but isn’t the whole picture.
• How overachievers accidentally turn "research mode" into a form of sneaky procrastination.
• The critical (and often missing) question: Do you actually know why your last plan didn’t work?
• What makes Phase 3 — all-or-nothing thinking — such a common sticking point.
• How understanding these first three phases can radically shift your approach (and your results).

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Featured on the Show:

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• Enter the giveaway by clicking here.

Download the full transcript here.

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  Hey friends. Welcome to the Burn Stress Lose Weight podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Priyanka Venugopal, and we are getting into an amazing three-part series, all about the very normal phases of weight loss and wellness. I've talked about the normal phases back in 2022, I decided to fully revamp the entire series and bring it back to you fresh with some new perspectives that I have gained over the last few years, and we're breaking it into a three-part series. It is the 10 phases of weight loss. They're all very normal phases. I'm going to get into each one in detail. I'm going to share with you where you might be getting stuck as an overachiever and the specific phases that you might need to get to to turn this ship around and we are hosting a massive giveaway for the three year anniversary of this podcast. So I would love for you to participate. We're going to have so many winners. It's a massive giveaway. I cannot wait. You can head over to burnstressloseweight.com/celebrate so you can see how to enter. You have to leave a rating and a review, and if you share this episode or this series with anyone, you up, your chances of winning. We're gonna be bamboozling you with all kinds of amazing gifts and celebrations. So I would love for you to help me celebrate this podcast. Head over to www.burnstressloseweight.com/celebrate. And without further ado, let's get into today's episode, The 10 phases of Weight Loss and Wellness.

  Phase one is all about the initial excitement that you feel, and this is the excitement you might feel either fresh on Monday morning. Or at the brand new start of a new year, or on your birthday when you buy a program or when you open up a new planner for the first time, there is something about a fresh start, whether it's new week, new year, new birthday, that will activate a feeling of excitement and motivation for you and this is normal. This is a really amazing part of the entire weight loss journey, is we all get to experience that flicker and moment of excitement and motivation. This is what I like to call activation energy. It will often compel you to take massive action. It's going to really activate you to decide that you're ready to really move forward, that you're ready to do something new. Do something different. It is amazing however, I wanna just take a second to talk about the trouble with phase one. The trouble with phase one is that motivation and excitement feels really, really, really, really, really, really good. And why I'm calling this a problem, I mean, I just said that activation energy is so amazing and so important. The time that it can become a problem is when your very normal brain starts to believe that that's the feeling you're supposed to have in. Your entire weight loss experience and you hitting your goals and you hitting your wellness goal, whether it's professionally or personally or on the scale, our brain starts to believe that that really good feeling on excitement and motivation is necessary to hit our goal. We're going to get into how you can overcome when that excitement and motivation dwindles later on in this entire phase series. But suffice it to say motivation and excitement feels amazing. It is very normal. It is an amazing part of the journey. It's one of my favorite parts of any journey because it feels amazing, and what this does is motivation and excitement is going to be your fuel that takes you into phase two. Phase two is all about the researching, the consumption, and the planning phase. This is where overachievers will actually spend a lot more time than necessary. We're going to get into that in a little bit. You end up spending a lot of time in consuming information. This might be that you go down some Google Rabbit holes to search what is the absolute number one best strategy to lose weight. You might try to decide, am I counting calories? Am I vegan? Am I vegetarian? Am I plant-based protein? Am I animal protein? How many macros am I supposed to eat? You start going down research rabbit holes. For a short while phase two is actually really important. It's really important to research and think about and really use a lot of critical thinking in terms of deciding what your absolute best strategy is. But phase two, the phase two version of planning, because we're going to get into proper planning later on in this series.

   

  Phase two, planning and researching and consuming is someone that is planning and strategizing, but you have a lot of gaps. You're not exactly 100% crystal clear on why your weight loss strategy did not work last time. You are not 100% crystal clear on why you haven't been able to sustain results, why it is that you lost weight before you and I have both lost weight multiple times in the past, but if you gained it back, are you 100% crystal clear on why? If it was not a capability issue, if it was not a discipline issue, where were your strategic gaps? What ends up happening when you don't know? This is phase two is lacking. Okay, so with phase two, why I really wanted to emphasize this is our very brilliant overachiever brains love consuming information. We love learning. We're like you and I are you know, we loving students. We love learning. We love courses, we love certifications, we love degrees on our wall behind us. We love learning because there is something very, very comfortable about staying in the learning phase and staying in passive consumption and our brain will sometimes make the mistake of believing that learning is productive. Now, you and I both know that there is a certain amount of learning that. Is productive. You want to gather information in a way so you can make an informed decision. But there comes a point and we can all kind of get a spidey sense of when that is where we start to use learning as a very sneaky procrastination tactic to not take uncomfortable action so I wanted to share that phase two, while it is important, it can sometimes be overutilized as a procrastination tactic. The other thing I want to emphasize with phase two and why I was talking about identifying the exact reason that you did not hit your goal or maintain your results from last week or last month, or last year or this last decade, is because oftentimes we will consume information and we will plan and have strategic gaps. Most of my clients, before they come to work with me, they are doing some form of calorie counting or points tracking or macro tracking, and just believing that they need to eat less and move more. Some flavor of that, they feel like they just aren't being disciplined and they need to just double down on what they said they were going to do. Sure, there is a piece of that. We're going to get into that later on in the series, but that is not the real reason that. You have not yet hit your goal. So if we cannot identify the specific strategic gap that was missing in the past, you might plan and plan and plan, but your next plan is going to still have those strategic gaps. Don't worry if you're listening to the series, we're going to get into the phases and the steps that are going to walk you into a solution. I promise you we're going to get to that, but I really, really, really want to spend enough time really painting a very solid, colorful, no white space photo for what is typically happening for most women on their weight loss and wellness journey.

  So stage one, phase one, we are fully in activation mode. We are excited, we are motivated. We are like, this is the year. This is the week. I can't tell you how many times every new year me and my best friend, like this is the year. So excited, and then we would plan. I'd have my brand new planner. We schedule it all out, and then real life would happen, which takes me to phase three. When you enter phase three, you have likely created some wins on the scale already, because remember, activation energy was really awesome and your plan, which might have been counting points, calories, macros, hitting the gym six days a week, or eating less and moving more, like whichever kind of flavor strategy you chose it works. All those things that I just talked about, they all do work. So the combination of phases one and two will create some. Results for you on the scale. So you're gonna walk into phase three feeling really good, like it's working. See, I'm doing it. I've got this. And then phase three is when real life happens. You're a busy, professional working mom. You're an overachiever. You are wanting life to go a certain way, and yet that is just not how life is. The waters get choppy. An obstacle comes up with your kid, with your work in the political sphere we are in, and all of a sudden circumstances are out of your control. Phase three is all or nothing thinking. Phase three is either I need to double down and push through and will power my way through this. And listen, we've all done that. If you're a professional woman, we all know how to grit and grind really hard through. Hard obstacles. So that's really normal. If you think I just need to double down and push harder, we'll try that for a little while until you fatigue, until your willpower fades away and you are left fatigued and exhausted or you go into the land of nothing, which is, I can't do this at all. You completely throw in the towel. You think next week, next Monday, next year, next birthday, next season, I will start over. So phase three is all or nothing thinking where you either think you have to double down or I need to. Hide for now and start fresh. I cannot tell you how long I stayed in this phase one, two, and three, where I would have this excitement and motivation and like this is the year energy. I would be lit up with possibility. I would plan beautifully. I would have my color coded ninja style planner either on paper or in my head. I would try to throw spaghetti at the wall, by the way 'cause I didn't really know why I didn't, I didn't work last time, so I'm kind of piecemealing and spaghetti on the wall, approaching my weight loss strategy, thinking that I have to do all of these things to lose the weight I want. I go ahead, I've move forward with that plan. I make a little bit of progress, and then real life would happen. I would get a call from the principal and my entire day. Would be ruined, or I would get into a fight with my partner and my entire day would be ruined, or I would get no sleep because of a middle of the night delivery or because my kids woke me up in the middle of the night, or I would have some type of life stress and all of a sudden I would go into all or nothing thinking I would. I either double down or give up. I wanna just take a minute here to really validate and normalize how common phase three is. If you have been in phase three, if you've been in phase one, two, and three, I want you to know that you're not alone. This is where most overachieving women are living because this is what has worked historically in. How you grew up when you were a kid and you were going to school and you were studying for the next exam or going for the next promotion, or trying to pass oral board exams. In my experience, this is what would work. You would have that excitement like, this is it. I've got this. You would make a plan, you would buckle down and push yourself to follow that plan. And because we can do that in short periods of time, you would get success. You would get the A, you would pass roll boards, you would get that promotion. And in short periods of time this would work. But what we are talking about, the difference between your professional career, your career as a student is in short burst. This works, but weight loss is a forever thing. This is why you will hear me say that if being smart. Was enough, you would've already lost the weight. Phase one, two, and three is for the smart cookie who can hit goals in so many areas of her life because these phases, one, two, and three, really work in short periods of time. They work for your project, they work for that deadline. They work for that group meeting that you have. They work for that call. You know, the 72 hour call you had, he like. Grit and grind all or nothing. Leaning in really hard works for short periods. It just does not last. When you have a goal like weight loss, which is we want it to be forever, we want it to be sustainable. So part of the reason that we go into phase three, which is this all or nothing thinking, is because we didn't know that there was a better way. We didn't know we had these strategic apps, so we never planned for them. We never filled them, and we didn't know. How to actually handle those really sticky moments without completely giving up on our goals and sabotaging ourself.

  Next week, we are going to talk about what I like to call the messy middle. The sticky middle, the part where people get stuck, and also the time that you start actually solving this problem once and for all. So in recap. This week we talked about phases one, two, and three, the excitement and motivation phase, which is amazing and normal and feels awesome, which I love phase two, which is consuming and planning, and sometimes over consuming and over planning to the point that it becomes a procrastination tactic and phase three where you have all or nothing thinking you hit an obstacle. Real life happens and you either try to double down, which creates a lot of fatigue or you throw in the towel. So phase one, two, and three. If you have been there, I promise you, I promise you, you're not alone. I have been there. I'm sharing all this from personal experience and also there is a way out. So make sure you come back next week when we get into the next set of phases. The sticky middle, and to where you start solving this problem. And before you go, just remember to come and help me celebrate this podcast. Three years have gone by. The podcast has truly been one of my most favorite parts of being a coach, where I really love, love, love sharing my personal stories. My real life fails what's possible when we understand strategy, science, and mindset to completely change and transform your life, podcast has been one of them, so I really hope that you partake in the celebration with me. We are going to have so many winners. I literally cannot wait. So head over to www.burnstressloseweight.com/celebrate all of the details and instructions will be there for you to partake in the celebration with me, and I love you all so much. Thanks for being here. Bye. Thanks for spending this time with me on the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast today. I hope that you are leaving today's podcast episode feeling a little lighter and more inspired than when we started. It turns out that you don't need to have a stress-free life to hit your goals on and off the scale, but when you feel more empowered to respond to your real life stresses with true strategy. We will game change how we show up and how we hit our goals. If you wanna take what you are learning here on the podcast and put it into real life implementation, it might be time for us to work together in the Burn Stress Lose Weight Feel Unstoppable group coaching program. Head over to burnstressloseweight.com, and you can learn all of the details, the nuts, the bolts, when the next group is starting, and exactly how you can join. Okay, friend, I'll see you next time.